Good morning, this is for Powered with the Daily Beast. It's Friday, May 7, and these are the top stories the ChiChi team is watching right now. Melinda Gates mowed with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein alongside her husband Bill in New York City at a meeting at Epstein's Upper East Side Mansion in September 2013. On the same day, the couple accepted the Laster Bloomberg Public Service Award.
Soon after, Melinda was allegedly furious at the relationship between the two men. According to people familiar with the situation, the meeting would prove a turning point for Bill's relationship with Epstein, as Melinda told friends after the encounter how uncomfortable she was in the company of the wealthy sex offender and how she wanted nothing to do with him. Brian Colfidge is a veteran who made headlines for raising $25 million, along with Steve Bannon for former President Donald Trump's border wall, as part of the We Build the Wall crowdfunding campaign. The newest indictment alleges that Colfidge underreported his own income on his 2019 tax return by the hundreds of thousands of dollars from We Build the Wall donors.
He received more than $350,000 in funds from donors who thought the money would go toward constructing a wall, but it was deposited right in the Colfidge's personal bank account. In August 2020, a jury charged Bannon Colfidge and others with defraying donors to their private wall-building campaign, which Colfidge has pleaded now guilty to. It found guilty in the latest charges Colfidge could face up to 20 years in prison. 74 cases of COVID-19 have been traced back to a single church in Oregon.
The People's Church in Salem, which is still holding in-person events and services, is now considered Oregon's eighth-largest active workplace outbreak. Votals from recent services at the church appear to show prisoners gathered without masks or social distancing. In a video statement released last month, the executive pastor of the church acknowledged Oregon's recent surge in COVID-19 cases, but said the church is frequently cleaned and surfaces sanitized, despite CDC guidelines that says the virus is unlikely to spread that way. The People's Church was recently part of an effort to overturn Governor Kate Brown's public health restrictions on the grounds that it violates the constitutional right to religious freedom.
While other states have seen numbers decline in recent weeks, during the month of April, Oregon's cases steadily rose. On the same day a bill was introduced on distracted driving, Ohio State Senator Andrew Brenner was caught driving during a government video conference. The senator can be seen in the Zoom conference on Monday with his seatbelt on. However, he changed his background to a living room.
I guess he thought that would conceal the fact that he was driving. Nonetheless, he says he does not see anything wrong with what he did. He told a local Ohio paper that he was not distracted, that he was able to drive and listen to the meeting simultaneously. He said he's, quote, been on other calls, numerous calls while driving.
The distracted driving bill reportedly aims to prohibit texting, taking photos, viewing videos, and using applications while behind the wheel. A mysterious 1983 murder of an Iranian-born University of Nebraska student has reportedly been solved after forensic evidence was found to match a man on the state's sex-offender registry. Bud Leroy Christensen was charged Thursday with the murder of Perrosa de Hagenpoor. Her naked body had been found on August 14, 1983, under a bridge in a rural area, her throat cut, with multiple stab wounds to her body.
Investigation into the decades-old case had been reopened in 2020 after an old friend of de Hagenpoor urged the local cop sergeant to take another look. Retesting of evidence collected during the original investigation found DNA from a male, which was able to be matched to Christensen. Florida rapper Kid West is taking Donald Glover, also known by his musical alias Childish Gambino, to court over the song This Is America. In a lawsuit filed in federal court Thursday, Kid West alleges that the hit song has, quote, substantial similarities to his 2016 song, Made in America.
His lawyer said in the statement that the resemblance between the two songs, quote, announced to infringement. The lawsuit seeks damages from profit across 43 different categories, including record sales, ringtones, and endorsements. That's all for this morning. Check back every weekday morning and afternoon for more of the news you need to know.
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